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Saturday, Oct 16, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Stalemate in the Northeast

By M.S. Prabhakara

As things stand, there simply is no ground for any kind of talks or even talks about talks with ULFA.

IN A little over six weeks, between Independence Day and Gandhi Jayanti this year, nearly 80 persons were killed, and many more injured, in violent incidents in Assam. Responsibility was claimed by the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB). The violence began with an explosion at the flag-hoisting ceremony at Dhemaji on August 15 and climaxed with a series of attacks throughout the State that went on for three days from Gandhi Jayanti. There were other incidents too in which people have died. These took place on both banks of the Brahmaputra and covered almost all the districts of its Valley.

In the incident on October 2, more than 30 persons were killed and many more seriously injured in two explosions talking place within minutes of each other at the Railway Station and a market nearby in Dimapur, Nagaland. In this case, however, no one has till now claimed responsibility for the outrage. The authorities too have not openly identified any suspects. Speculation is rife over the identity of the perpetrators, who could belong to any of the numerous (over a dozen identified) outfits operating in the region.

Though Dimapur is part of Nagaland, the city falls outside the purview of the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation Act, 1873, the enabling legislation for the Inner Line Permit regulation that controls the entry of non-Nagas into Nagaland. It is a `one of a kind free city' in the Northeast, allowing for the transit and operation of every kind of entrepreneurial activity, commercial, insurgent and criminal; the dividing lines are not always very clear. Terrorist/militant organisations from every State of the region, perhaps from outside the region as well, are known to operate from Dimapur.

The use of the expression, terrorist/militant, is deliberate. Indeed, the terms themselves are used interchangeably in official parlance, as can be heard daily in any radio news bulletin. The usage reflects the ambiguities surrounding the claims of and perceptions about the leaders of the outfits in society at large. It also points to the lack of clarity at the highest levels of governance regarding the stated aims of these outfits, and the strategies employed for well on half a century to defeat them — corrupt by pouring vast sums of money into the region or co-opt or negotiate or suppress with extreme violence.

The current buzzwords are unified command incorporating the Army and the civil administration, greater coordination among all the States, more troops, new codewords for operations which are not so new. Needless to say, none of these methods has worked.

Ever since the launching of the anti-foreigner agitation in Assam in the late 1970s, the call for a boycott of official ceremonies commemorating Republic Day and Independence Day has been an annual feature. Earlier it was given by stray organisations or individuals with vaguely articulated separatist agendas and sometimes enforced with violence (as on January 26, 1968). ULFA leaders — whose politicisation began in the anti-foreigner agitation, though this has taken a different direction since then — have further refined this tactic with threats of violence, executed with brutal effectiveness.

Thus, before January 26 and August 15 every year, elaborate security arrangements are put in place in expectation of violent intervention by these outfits. However, these have seldom hampered the terrorist/militant outfits from at the very least `making a statement' on these days.

ULFA, rather prematurely written off following the crackdown on its camps in Bhutan in December last year, was widely expected to make a very strong statement this August 15. Only such a demonstration would enable the outfit to go on with its fund collections, recruitment, spreading its illusory visions of Swadhin Asom.

What is, however, new this year is the nature of the terrorist/militant intervention especially in Dhemaji on Independence Day. The victims were mostly schoolchildren who had been assembled for the march-past.The public outrage over the Dhemaji incident was, however, appropriated by the authorities who began a sustained campaign against ULFA, branding its leaders `killers of children'. The campaign of overkill simply did not catch on. Nor has it deterred ULFA from perpetrating further outrages.

The sub-text of the attacks and the campaign by the State Government is the putative `talks' in which, from different perspectives, both are interested. ULFA leaders have been saying, though always with a forked tongue, that they are ready to talk but on their terms, and only with the Union Government. There have also been vague statements, always conveyed by satellite telephone or e-mail to the media, that ULFA has dropped two of its three preconditions — that the talks have to be held outside the country and under the aegis of an international body. The third condition remains constant: that the talks should be about the `transfer of sovereignty of Assam to ULFA'. The State Government has tried to get ULFA to talk, on its terms. The Chief Minister rather grandly offered a `ceasefire' if ULFA was ready to talk.

Routinely, other political parties and groups too have got into the act, demanding `ceasefire' and `unconditional talks'. This point was made most recently during the two-day `National Convention' organised by the Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuba Chhatra Parishad (AJYCP), an organisation to which several ULFA leaders once belonged. What is ignored in all these interventions is that, as things stand, there simply is no ground for any kind of talks or even talks about talks. One can go further and argue that to seek any kind of `solution' to the kind of problems created by successive governments over the decades and in turn exploited by terrorist/militant organisations is really seeking a mirage. Solutions to problems in the public domain, once seen as the rightful entitlement of a people that the state provided in any civilised society, are quite irrelevant in the new orthodoxy of the market that the country has openly embraced.

The analogy with the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, in positing the problems and solutions, is particularly misleading. ULFA is far from acquiring even the kind of legitimacy that the NSCN has acquired. As for the denouement of the talks with the NSCN, the process is still very much like squaring the circle. The uncompromisingly adamant Manipuri territorial nationalistic assertion stands firm like a rock against Naga nationalistic assertion whose bottom line is the integration of all Naga inhabited areas under one political unit.

And yet, leaving aside such double talk about talks, one has to ask this basic question: how is it that ULFA continues to get away with its outrageous interventions again and again? Some of its uninformed formulations about the marginalisation of Assam and the Northeast region once had a sympathetic resonance among the Assamese middle class and rural gentry. It had thus acquired a measure of legitimacy among this class but by its actions, and the opportunistic and self-destructive alliances it forged in the last decade, it has squandered that sympathy.

It is not as if ULFA is a coherent political structure offering a credible socio-economic programme. Nor is it that the people on whose behalf it claims to speak forgive its crimes and follies. Rather, it is the Indian state that has lost its credibility, indeed its legitimacy, thus enabling such organisations with an exclusivist ideology to occupy a political space and present themselves as serious alternatives. Instances of such monumental folly abound. Most of them are grim; some comical beyond belief. One has only to look around, for one faces them every moment of one's conscious hours.

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